Updated on April 15th, 2024 at 09:47 pm
A keyword universe can help you identify opportunities, create content briefs and develop a winning SEO strategy for your website.
Here’s what a keyword universe is, how to create one, the benefits a keyword universe can bring and how much you should pay for a keyword universe for your project.
We can help you create a keyword universe for your business that’ll help you understand the potential of the sectors you are exploring and weigh up the benefits, potential returns and competitive intensity of each vertical.
What is a Keyword Universe?
A keyword universe is a bulk analysis of keywords, intended to help you find, group and understand which sectors are;
- Most valuable to your business
- Easiest to rank for based on keyword difficulty
- Provides the best opportunities for specific content types
- The intent behind the search queries
- Types of supporting content you can create to help rank from the primary commercial and transactional keywords within a topic.
A keyword universe is a collection of many thousands of keywords, grouped, organized and deduplicated with relevant volume data, cost estimates, revenue potential and trends built in to help you understand which areas, topics, sections and specific content pieces provide the best opportunities to generate leads and sales for your business.
If you’re looking for a one stop shop SEO strategy, i.e. a single project that can help you define the direction of travel for your business website, then a keyword universe offers this.
How to Create a Keyword Universe
Creating a keyword universe is a fairly simple process once you know how to do so, however the real value comes from employing someone to create your keyword universe who has experience working in organic search because they’ll be able to provide you with insights, advice and recommendations to enable you to understand the data provided and what it means for your business.
Here is how we approach keyword universe creation to help you get the insights your business needs to thrive in today’s competitive online environment.
- Create a list of topics your interested in exploring
- Pull keywords from a number of sources including; free and paid tools, Google search sources, your existing website data and Google search results themselves
- consider multiple angles of search data and search intent to help create various inbound routes to your website that aren’t just focused on the highest volume queries.
- Merge keyword data, apply value modeling and estimates and flatten the data.
- Deduplicate keywords into a single list
- Run keywords through frequency tools to get an idea of popular queries
- Return valuable, useful data against keywords to give an accurate comparative value of the keywords being assessed
- Create grouping methods to allow you to quickly and easily group certain keywords together
- Run grouping analysis to define topics
- Tag keywords so they appear in one or more relevant topical group
- Identify evergreen question terms to help you quickly identify commonly searched for user questions and queries
- Review the data, assess keywords for sentiment and intent
- Understand the types of keywords searched for, what users are expecting to see and map these to planned or live content pages on your website, using relevant keywords to help define the URL slug.
With all of the above steps complete, you’ll have a complete keyword universe to allow you to identify and determine head keywords to target for every page within a section of your website.
Once you have the “what” data, you can work on; how content will be produced, the publishing schedule for the content and plan to ensure your site grows.
What is a Keyword Universe Used for?
By offering reliable, consistent metrics across keywords and custom grouping of keywords into topics, you’ll be able to easily see which of these topics offers the best option for you to commit business resources to.
For example, if you’re running a website that offers multiple financial services, for example as a financial advisor, including;
- High net worth finance
- Tax efficiency
- Investment planning
- Investment vehicles
- Strategies for concentrated real estate position
You’ll be able to compare keywords related to each, at a glance, in an easy to use excel spreadsheet to help you determine which are best for you to focus on.
You’ll be able to decide by;
- Ease to rank
- Potential revenue
- Search volume
- SERP features
- KW intent type
If you’d like, you can combine a keyword universe project with a defined SEO strategy that helps you to join up the potential of the keywords included in your lists to a defined action plan to help your site grow.
The insights are simple to understand, but powerful because you can easily determine which pieces of content to publish when and how they fit in with the products and services you offer.
What’s the Benefit of a Keyword Universe?
The benefits of a keyword universe are many, as well as allowing you to quickly and easily compare topics side by side to enable you to make quick decisions on your SEO strategy.
By having as many as possible keywords, thoroughly researched and grouped together in a single sheet, you can consistently refer back to them to help keep your SEO efforts on course.
You can use the sheet to help define:
- Potential content titles for commercial pages and long copy pieces
- Topical approaches to keywords so you can see the variety and depth of content to offer your users
- URL slug definition
- Targeting definition for title tags and meta descriptions
Because of the detail provided, keyword universe data can also help you understand concepts like;
- content strategy and publishing schedule for several years
- Relevant backlink anchor text to gain from external sites for your website
- Topic depth and the amount of content required to rank effectively for complex and high value topics.
- evergreen content opportunities to create content that will pay you back consistently overtime from the date of publication.
- Site structure and hierarchy of your content – by understanding volumes, you can determine the best way to structure your website to prioritise your highest value topics, services and ideas.
- Content leveling analysis; how and where each piece of content you produce fits in with your overarching content strategy on the conversion funnel.
- Forecasting and market share analysis using your keyword universe volume data to help you understand your content success and market share.
The core benefit of a keyword universe is allowing you, in a single hit of work, to determine your priorities and gain specific, data led insights into what to work on as well as why these areas are important to ensure your website offers full coverage of the topic and has the best chance of ranking competitively for search queries that users input.
How Much Does a Keyword Universe Cost?
Keyword universe creation is expensive because it is time consuming and provides a huge amount of value to website owners when used correctly.
They’re dependent on the industry you’re entering into. Lower value industries like small business SEO will be much cheaper and likely narrower than multinational companies looking to explore content opportunities across different geos, industries and sectors.
Product complexity levels also play a factor, high complexity areas like health and SEO for finance are also more expensive than lower complexity areas like simple ecommerce and online retail sites.
For an estimate on the cost of a keyword universe for your business, see our SEO cost calculator, select your industry and choose the lowest page count.
This calculator numbers can be used as a guideline to pricing however, specific prices will vary based on the number of topics you’d like explored, the detail level you’d like provided and whether you have an existing website or not.
Please contact us for a conversation and to get started with your keyword universe today.
Published on: 04/07/2023